2017 Outreach to High Schools

Physical Swarmathon teams are expected to mentor high school students in their own communities to build their skills and interest in computer programming and robotics. We encourage Swarmathon teams to be creative and to leverage any existing outreach or community projects they have available.

Additionally, the Swarmathon will run a contest specifically for high school teams. This will be a virtual contest run in the Netlogo programming language. We have developed a short tutorial and set of exercises to introduce high school students to the Swarmathon and Netlogo.

Module 2: Direct RecruitmentA single 2-3 hour workshop, complete module 2 as a walk through while also engaging students by having them code on their own and discuss NetLogo programming basics.

Module 3: StigmergyA single 2-4 hour workshop. This is a larger workshop that may take one or two sessions to complete. This module incorporates more advanced NetLogo programming topics than Module 2 as well as topics in Biology.

Module 4: Swarmathon 1 A single 2-4 hour workshop. This is also a larger workshop that builds upon all of the lessons learned in the first three modules. This is a good place to review NetLogo programming concepts introduced in the other modules so that they can be applied in the next module.

Module 5: Swarmathon 2This module is the capstone project of the module progression. It will allow students to be able to apply the lessons they learned from the previous models in order to create their own agent based model. The students should be given as much time as possible to design, write, and test their solution. The code written for this module is what a Swarmathon high school competition would be based on.